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Princeton University filed a lawsuit against the Education Department on Friday in an effort to stop the release of hundreds of pages of documents that would reveal some of the university’s private admissions procedures, Politico reported.
The documents were obtained by the Education Department as part of a seven-year civil rights investigation into whether Princeton was discriminating against Asian and Asian-American applicants.
The investigation was closed in 2015 after the department found insufficient evidence to support the claims of racial discrimination, but a group called the Students for Fair Admissions has been trying to access the Princeton documents under a Freedom of Information Act request.
Princeton’s lawsuit seeks to halt the release of those documents on the grounds that they contain sensitive and confidential demographic data, university policies and admissions practices that “would cause substantial competitive harm to the university if disclosed.”
The university has already attempted to stop the FOIA request from being granted once before. Earlier this month, the Education Department rejected Princeton’s request for FOIA exemption, explaining that such an exemption is not appropriate given the nature of the materials the university handed over during the department’s investigation.
In the rejection letter to Princeton, officials from the Education Department wrote that, should the documents be released, they would redact any identifiable information about individual applicants.
The department released 868 documents related to Students for Fair Admissions’ FOIA request earlier this year. The remaining set includes 861 documents.
